First published in 1940, this work comprises three poignant novellas of love and death in the Egyptian countryside.
The heroines of Out El Kouloub’s Three Tales tells the stories of Nazira, Zahira, and Zarifa, whose narratives afford the rest of the world a glimpse of the “veiled” culture: from an insider’s perspective.
Throughout the book, Out El Kouloub takes the reader to a variety of colorful. locations-through streets, bazaars, holy sites and homes of Cairo. Her stories take her characters into the intimate geographical and psychological space of different classes and upbringings that make up Egyptian life. This is an Egypt described not by an orientalist but by an Egyptian woman who has either lived or observed the’ experiences that form the fabric of her written work.
Three Tales is a companion volume to Ramza and Zanouba, also Kouloub, and each translated from the French by Nayra Atiya.
Out El Kouloub (1899-1968) fled Cairo in the early 1960s after Nasser came to power. She is the author of five books including Ramza and Zanouba.
Nayra Atiya is the author of Khul-Khaal: Fin Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories, also published by Syracuse University Press.
